What are your rights to compensation for data breach?

Under the Data Protection Law, individuals who have suffered as a result of a data breach have the right, by law, to claim for compensation.

If you have experienced a personal data breach, you may be able to claim compensation for cases where you have suffered financial loss or experienced distress as a result of the data breach incident.

Data breaches can happen in multiple ways including:

• accidental data breaches caused by human or software error
• malicious internal data breaches conducted by an insider
• malicious external data breaches conducted by an outsider or hacker
• loss or misplacement of physical files containing personal data information

Therefore, it is important that you regularly check whether your data has been breached and report any concerns about a potential data breach as soon as you are aware that it may have occurred.

The Data Protection Law ensures organisations have a duty to protect your data. Under this law, if an organisation holding your personal and credit card details has a security breach, they must inform you promptly.

When informed of a data breach, you will be advised to take protective personal measures such as:

• changing your passwords and user details for other online accounts and websites.
• contacting your bank or credit card provider to cancel the card and notify of the risk.
• keeping an eye on all credit, financial and online accounts in case of identity fraud.

This breach of personal data may cause you considerable distress, especially in circumstances where you may have registered your credit card and financial details across a wide range of organisations.

There may be no actual financial loss, or any loss may be compensated by your bank or credit card provider. However, the distress you experience as a result of the data breach will have to be redressed by the organisation which breached your data.  When you open a data breach investigation into an organisation that has breached your data, you may be due financial compensation.

In addition, the Court of Appeal has recently ruled that breaches leading to loss of control over data ought to be compensated without proof of distress or financial loss. For more information read Richard Lloyd v Google LLC [2019] EWCA Civ 1599.

If you think your data has been breached, you could be entitled to compensation. Get in touch with our team to find out or complete our quick claim form here.